Freshman Year
A Year of New Beginnings
I believe a Global Citizen Scholar is someone who is willing to contribute their skills towards solving any problems in their community, country, or world. In other words I think it is anyone willing to donate any skills they have to the benefit of others. This is what myself and many other people hope to achieve throughout our lives while being doctors, teachers, engineers, artists, and many other things. For example, I think a little task such as putting together an art therapy session for someone that you know could make them happy, qualifies someone as being a Global Citizen scholar since they have now used a skill they have to help someone else.
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Throughout freshman year, I worked to become a global citizen scholar by doing more things on campus and in the community. One of the main things I did within the school was join educational and discussional clubs that teach me more about different populations of people. One of the first groups I joined was Social Justice in Medicine or SJM, where we talked about how underrepresented groups of people in our society do not have access to proper health care and how we could work to potentially fix the problems. Another group I am a part of is Parkinsons Together, where I learned about Parkinson’s disease and how to conduct service-based research regarding the illness. The last group I joined was Curez, this group, based all over the country, allowed me to join discussions on the stigma and misinformation spread about people who have Schizophrenia. In this group, I met and talked with the creator, who has schizophrenia, about her story and how I could help her goals regarding the club.
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Another important thing I did to get closer to becoming a Global Citizen Scholar, was to join a service learning course. This course allowed me to work with members of the community weekly and provide them with activities such as art therapy, music therapy, and mindful meditation. Since the groups of people we worked with were people with neurodegenerative disorders, our service was something that helped stimulate them to be more active physically and mentally.
I believe that this class and the clubs listed above have helped me to gain more knowledge and opportunities towards helping different groups of people. While working with different groups of people I have added more to my communication and people skills, which have enhanced my relationship building qualities.
Sophomore year I plan on staying active in these clubs so that I may learn more with my peers and possibly even create club projects aimed at giving back to the community. I also plan on joining a club like bearcat buddies, since this is something that could give me experiences in working with children of different backgrounds. With these plans in mind, I will be able to utilize more of my skills to help provide for as many people as I can in hopes of simply brightening their day for as little as a moment or even as long as they can remember.
My future aspiration as a Global Citizen Scholar is to become a pediatric primary care physician. When thinking far ahead into my career, I want to be known as someone who communicates well with their patients, who learns from their patients and helps to treat the root of their issues rather than temporarily fixing it. I truly believe that by continuing with my freshman and sophomore year plan I will be able to become that doctor soon enough.
Sophomore Year
A Year of Personal Growth
Sophomore year was one of the most eye opening years of my young adult life. This is the year where I actually sat down and thought deeply about what it is I want to accomplish in my future career. That self reflection led to so much personal growth.
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During the spring semester, I took the topics I learned about in my freshman Professioanl Development class about the different healthcare professionals and used it to fuel my research. I was researching on these careers to try and compare them to the medical doctor career path I was on. I was having second thoughts about going to med school, I wasnt sure if it was something I felt very passionate about . So i was looking for other alternatives to getting a career in healthcare where I could take care of people. Through all this research I gained a real interest in Physician Assistants. I thought it was so cool how they were able to care for patients and help them with their treatments very similar to how doctors would. Their flexibility between specialties, better work life balance, and shorter education was very enticing to me and was just what I was looking for. So I began an even deeper dive into the similarities and differences between MD and PA to see whether I wanted to change or not. I scheduled meetings with the my PPAC advisor and my college advisor to see whether this was something I could switch to without delaying my college graduation date. And to my luck my major aligned alot with the requirements of PA school and diddnt differ much in terms of classes. By the end of fall semester, after all the meetings and research, I decided to switch my career path to aim towards going to PA school.
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By fall semester, I had shadowed PAs and had fallen even more in love with the idea of becoming a PA. However my parents were not so much on board with this plan I had. I personally tend to put a lot of value into what my parents want for me, and since they had really hoped for me to become a doctor, I started to have second thoughts and what I wanted to do. I had to decide if what I wanted was more important than potentially disappointing some of the most important people in my life. I had resilience thought, and had to prove to myself and to my parents that I was serious about this career and was not just trying to run away from the hardship of going through med school. I created a plan of when to take the 3 extra classes, when and how to start building my needed patient care experiences, and a list of possible PA schools I could apply for after graduating.
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This overall was a really stressful time for me as it was as a little overwhelming having to plan what seemed like the next 3 to 4 years of my life while making sure to not fall behind in my classes. It seemed like every other week I would have a crisis and be scared of failing my plan and proving that I should have listened to what my parents wanted for me. But in the end I am really glad that I listened to myself and am doing something that I personally really want to do. This is something that I am proud of myself for pushing through and not giving up on. Moving on into junior year I plan on meeting more with my PPAC advisor to ensure that I am on a good path to apply to PA schools, working alot to build my patient experiences and possibly plan for a growth year where I will continue to grow my application.
Junior Year
A Year of Preparation
One major difference between my junior year of college and my previous two years is that this year I worked part time at a job while being a full time student. It was a difficult transition, especially with the rigorous courses I was taking, but it was needed to help build my application towards physician assistant school. After taking medical assistant classes during summer last year, I was able to get a job as a certified clinical medical assistant at an urgent care in cincinnati.
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I was very excited to work a job that help me gain healthcare experience as a pre-pa student. It helped me learn skills such as giving injections, drawing blood, and aiding in procedures. It also helped me learn more customer service skills and how to interact with people who are in painful situations. The urgent care is located in an area of Cincinnati that can be seen as a lower socioeconomic location. We see a wide variety of people; some who are very well off with an insurance that covers mostly everything, some people with no insurance, some homeless people and some people who are seeking drugs. As I continued to work at urgent care it made me think of a serious and social issue that people face in the US, which is the complexities of health insurance.
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This was something I learned alot about during the honors seminar I took this year called democratizing healthcare. We talked alot about the different healthcares and health insurances people use around the world and how politics and the culture of a country can negatively or positively impact it. Working at the urgent care seemed like a real life example to what we were learning in the class. One example is of patients who would wait so long to come in due to not having health insurance and would avoid going to the hospital in fear of the major bills they would have to pay. A Lot of times the people who do not have health insurance work so much but are still not eligible for health insurance through their jobs and the many requirements that good health insurances require. My goals to combat things like this as an MA is to try to reassure patients that there are ways to be seen by a provider without fear of it costing too much. I hope to help educate them on the different programs that help to cover or lower the cost of being seen by a provider, and that it is important to put your health above things like work or fear of how much it would cost. It is things like this that have me so motivated to become a physician assistant, so that I can try to help people who are impoverished and in fear of the hospital systems.